Future of Personas – Round Two

After much feedback about the current Personas integration in Firefox 3.6 I thought I’d update everyone on our current plans for getpersonas.com, the Personas feature in Firefox and the Personas Plus add-on.

getpersonas.com

As stated before, we will be migrating getpersonas.com over to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This will involve redesigning the entire personas section of AMO to make it more interactive and engaging. Our current plan is to support uploading and reviewing personas on AMO at approximately the beginning of May. About a month after that we will turn off uploading personas on getpersonas.com and offer a migration flow to move over your account and personas to AMO. Two to three months after that we will shut down getpersonas.com (un-migrated accounts will most likely be automatically migrated, we’re still working on the process for this).

After that AMO will be the definitive source for personas. It will include features such as collections, a much improved upload flow and review tools, tagging, reviews, ratings and detailed statistics. The personas experience on AMO will be an order of magnitude better than on getpersonas.com.

Here are two in-progress designs for personas on AMO for your viewing pleasure:

Persona detail page:

Persona category page:

Personas Plus

Personas Plus will be continually updated and improved upon. Our current plan is to implement the ability to apply a persona while using a theme in the next release. This has been our number one request and we’ve heard you 🙂 . We also have plans to use Personas Plus to test new features such as dynamic personas, ability to change buttons and window or tab specific personas.

Personas

The personas feature in Firefox will continue to evolve with each release. Features that work well and are successful in the Personas Plus add-on may be uplifted into Firefox itself.